Reading RSS feeds
Friday 20 May 2005 – 13:52RSS feeds, or “feeds” for short, is currently very hot. It took me a while to get hooked, but the last year or so, I’ve been following about 10 feeds. It’s an excellent way of being lazy. You don’t need to visit a bunch of websites every day to see if they have been updated. You can sit comfortably in your chair and just wait for them to update and instantly get notified. OK, maybe not instantly but atleast within the hour or something like that. Now to my dilemma…
I haven’t found a good way of reading my feeds. I’ve tried Live Bookmarks in Firefox. Didn’t like them. Mainly because they were buggy when first released, atleast for me. I’ve tried the Sage extension. Quite usable, but for some reason unknown to me, I stopped using it. Then I tried an external program (RSS Bandit) for a while. Top notch program. Started to use it mostly because it had a feature to share feeds between different computers (more on that topic below). Unfortunately that feature didn’t behave the way I wanted it to behave, so I gave up on it.
Now I’m using the RSS feature in Mozilla Thunderbird. In my head, RSS notifications are much like emails. Or atleast, I want to be notified about an updated feed the same way I get notified about a new email in my inbox. Also, reading my feeds “as emails” seems to work for me. However, a problem I have yet to resolve is sharing my feeds (and their status) between computers. I often move between my work computer, my home computer and my laptop. I want my feeds (and their status, and this is important) to automatically synchronize between computers. RSS Bandit came close, but I was forced to manually upload and download the shared feeds. I want it to be performed in the background, without the need of manual work.
For the time being, I’m sticking with Thunderbird. If you have suggestions on what I might try next, please feel free to comment. Note: I’m mostly on Windows these days.
Update: See comments below for info on my current solution.
4 Responses to “Reading RSS feeds”
Maybe the solution is, for you, to code a little snippet that sends emails to you, and using IMAP you could then manage the feeds..?
By jocke on May 22, 2005
An RSS to Email gateway? Not a bad idea. Not bad at all. And it seems like someone else has had this idea too. :) But it’s in Python. How horrible. It needs to be in Perl, damnit! Heh, just kidding. But, and you know me Jocke, it sure would be nice to code it myself. Have to give it some thought. Thanks for the idea though.
By dempa on May 23, 2005
OK, now I’m using this solution for fetching RSS data and sending it to my mailbox. On my mail server, I’m using procmail to sort it to a folder called “rss”.
By dempa on May 23, 2005
… and now I’m also trying out BlogLines. There are some nifty Firefox extensions for this service which just might suite me well. However, the feeling I have right now is that the email approach is probably better for me. Time will tell I guess.
By dempa on May 23, 2005